Page 205 of Fractured Devotion
Vescari is inside. I know this because Lorna told me herself, her voice still echoing in my mind. She gave me everything—coordinates, security details, and most importantly, his exact schedule. He never leaves this place after nightfall. This refinery is his bunker, his kingdom of shadows.
He is the next one on my list. The one I can reach tonight.
The one with blood-soaked hands that I can drag into the dirt.
But he isn’t the last. Rourke is still out there somewhere beyond my reach, for now. I’m saving him for the end. The final chapter. He deserves that much.
But Vescari? He’s mine tonight.
He’s one of the architects who carved their names into the bones of children, who traded minds and bodies for data points,who thought they could play gods while the rest of us became their broken creations.
I’ve carved their names into my memory and branded them into the inside of my skull. Not for justice, not for revenge, and not because I believed it would fix anything.
But because I can still hear the screams.
My mother’s screams while strapped to a chair and begging under the cold hands of menworsethan Vescari or Rourke. People cut from an older, crueler cloth. The kind of monsters who didn’t hide behind corporations or data streams. They broke people up close with their hands, and they enjoyed it.
I was just a child. They erased me and rewrote me, every moment of pain carefully designed to make me obedient, efficient, and hollow.
And lately, another voice threads through those screams. Celeste’s.
Watching her unravel and watching her fight her way back from the same pit they once threw me into dragged everything back to the surface. Her pain doesn’t belong to her alone anymore. It coils tightly around my ribs, burrowing deeper.
Her story and mine aren’t just similar. They’re tangled, knotted together in ways I can’t ignore. The same kind of hands that broke me shaped her too. And every time I watched her claw toward freedom, I saw my mother’s eyes. I saw my own.
They thought they’d buried it deep enough and that no one would ever dig it back up.
But she did.
And now, I remember everything.
Tonight, I take back every piece they ever stole.
I slip from the ridge, my every step absorbed by the dirt, my heartbeat steady, my purpose clear.
Vescari won’t walk away.
None of them were meant to.
I move through the shadows, keeping low, my focus unbroken.
The first guard rounds a corner, yawning, his rifle loose in his grip.
I grab him from behind, my gloved hand sealing his mouth, the knife sliding cleanly beneath his chin. Warmth spills out in a gush.
He doesn’t even struggle.
I drag him into the dark, leaving him slumped among the scrap.
Another comes, whistling a tune, unaware of the stain already spreading across the ground.
One quick snap of the neck, and he drops like a puppet with cut strings.
The others fall just as easily, methodical and silent.
This isn’t a fight.
It’s culling.
